Allegiance Role and its child classes Enemy Role and Neutral Role

[gregfowlerphd]

I think there are a few concerns regarding the asserted subclass relations here. The main problem involves the definition for Allegiance Role, according to which such a role ‘inheres in an Agent by virtue of the support it has committed to provide to another Agent when that Agent is involved in a conflict’. Given this definition, it seems that Enemy Role and Neutral Role aren’t subclasses of Allegiance Role: If agent A1 bears a neutral role with respect to agent A2, there might be no such thing as (and perhaps must be no such thing as) ‘the support [A1] has committed to provide to’ A2, in which case A1’s neutral role cannot inhere in it by virtue of such support. And similarly for Enemy Role.

One possible route that might be pursued here would involve changing ‘the support’ to ‘the degree of support’ (with the latter understood as having both zero and negative values, in addition to positive ones).